As known, a virtual machine (VM) is a software implementation of a machine (e.g., a computer) that executes computer programs. A VM typically emulates a physical computing environment, with requests for a central processing unit (CPU), memory, hard disk, and other hardware resources being managed by a virtualization layer which translates these requests to the underlying physical hardware. Virtual machines are created within a virtualization layer, such as a hypervisor or a virtualization platform that runs on top of a client or server operating system. System migrations of virtual machines may be desired for a variety of reasons, including the ability to provide a backup system while hardware and/or software upgrades are being installed. System migrations may also be performed to move a virtual machine to a new processor or other hardware. There are a number of approaches to performing the migration, including halting execution of a virtual machine to perform the migration, as well as performing a live migration, which migrates a virtual machine while it is executing. Live virtual machine migration is often desired by companies with mission critical systems.
Data center power outages can occur for a variety of reasons, including natural disasters. Natural disasters or other weather-related causes have become a more frequent variable in the availability of data centers. To ensure that a data center, including any virtual machines running within the data center, can remain running while experiencing a main power outage, battery backup systems and gas-powered generators may be used to continue to power the data center, for instance, to facilitate an ordered shutdown and/or backup of running systems. In many cases, however, data may end of being lost due to inefficient backup mechanisms, or backup mechanisms that are never started, or that fail to complete before battery backup systems run out of energy, or backup generators run out of fuel.